This document outlines the goals and objectives of a professional development for English instructors on working with multilingual and nonstandard dialect students. It aims to provide instructors with an overview of issues these students face, explore relevant scholarship like bidialectalism and code-meshing, and give instructors pedagogical tools and best practices to make their classrooms more effective for these students. Specific topics that will be covered include levels of code-switching awareness, code-meshing strategies, and resources like Rosina Lippi-Green's text on nonstandard dialects. The overall goal is to help instructors provide more student agency and support multilingual and nonstandard dialect students in the writing process.

1. April Cobos
EFFECTIVE
PEDAGOGICAL TOOLS
FOR MULTILINGUAL AND
NONSTANDARD DIALECT
STUDENTS IN THE
WRITING CLASSROOM

2. My main objective is to advocate for more
professional development opportunities in
the form of conferences, workshops, and
in-services for current and future English
instructors that allow for a more well-
rounded understanding of how to work
with nonstandard dialect and multilingual
students in the classroom.
PURPOSE:

3. To have current and future English college
level instructors walk away from linguistic
and language based professional
development with a better understanding
of how to provide student agency for
students with nonstandard dialects in the
various stages of their own writing
process.
GOAL:

4.  Overview of common problems with nonstandard
dialect students and multilingual students in the
classroom.
 Explore scholarship, specifically bidialectialism,
critical contrastive rhetoric and code-meshing.
 Provide instructors with pedagogical tools that
can be applied to specific classroom settings
 Provide instructors effective, best pedagogical
practices in their own classrooms and to find
methods for transforming current practices into
more effective practices.
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
OBJECTIVES

5. Baxter and Holland’s categories of
student awareness:
 Low awareness:
Those Black American students who
speak Ebonics and lack adequate code-
switching abilities
 Some awareness:
Those Black American students who
speak Ebonics and show some code-
switching abilities
 High awareness:
Those Black American students who
speak Standard English only or who are
bidialectical, speaking Ebonics and
having strong code-switching abilities
(Baxter and Holland 149)
Baxter and
Holland present
a study about
the levels of
awareness of
code-switching
in a study to
suggest that
instructors need
to provide more
awareness to
their
nonstandard
dialect students
to allow them to
have student
agency over
their own
choices in the
writing
classroom.

6. Rosina Lippi-
Green’s text
would be a
valuable resource
for a professional
development for
English
instructors. It
covers
nonstandard
dialects, language
myths, Standard
English myths,
etc.

7. “In aiming for praxis with and among students,
critical teachers consistently question what they
do and critique the means by which they teach
students.”
There is a need for consistent and constant
reevaluation of purpose and methodology. In
this regard, teachers ask themselves:
What am I doing?, Where is it leading?,
What do I intend to achieve?, Where
might I be better informed?”
KUBOTA AND LEHNER
CRITICAL CONTRASTIVE RHETORIC (PG. 23)

8. The differences
between asking
students to
code-switch
and asking
students to
code-mesh.
They advocate
for code-
meshing in
order to
provide more
STUDENT
AGENCY.
CANAGARJAH
AND LUNA

9. CODE-MESHING STRATEGIES
C A N AG A R A JA H A N D M I C H A E L - L U N A , 6 0

10.  Baxter, Milton, and Rochelle Holland. “Addressing the Needs
of Students Who Speak a Nonstandard English Dialect.” Adult
Basic Education and Literacy Journal 1.3 (Fall 2007) 145-
153. EBSCO. Web. 29 January 2013.
 Kubota, Ryuko, and Al Lehner. “Toward Critical Contrastive
Rhetoric.” Journal of Second Language Writing 13: (2004), 7-
27. ERIC. Web. 4 March 2013.
 Lippi-Green, Rosina. English With An Accent. 2nd Edition.
Routledge, New York: 2012. Print.
------Companion Website. Routledge. Web. 13 February 2013.
http://www.routledge.com/cw/lippi-green-9780415559119/
 Michael-Luna, Sarah, and A. Suresh Canagarajah.
“Multilingual Academic Literacies:Pedagogical Foundations for
Code Meshing in Primary and Higher Education.”Journal of
Applied Linguistics 4.1 (2007): 55-77. EBSCO. Web. 17 Feb
2013.
WORKS CITED